Your essential catch-up of the week's news

By FCW Staff

Sep 13, 2013

The House floated the possibility of voting on a continuing resolution this week, then pulled it back over disagreements on how to push back on Obamacare. The next most likely time for a vote will be sometime this coming week.

Worried about the potential blemish on its integrity, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reopened the public comment period on encryption standards approved years ago, following revelations that the National Security Agency had tampered with them.

The intelligence community is definitely sold on cloud computing, putting it own infrastructure in place. However, CIO Al Tarasiuk warned that there are still a few years of work ahead before information sharing among the 17 agencies that are part of the IC will be at the needed level.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, meanwhile, suggested that ICITE -- the intelligence community's initiative to unify IT systems -- might have sniffed out former contractorEdward Snowden's downloads sooner.

And the Department of Health and Human Services data hub that is central to Obamacare's health insurance exchanges was cleared for launch, just in time for the Oct. 1 deadline.

ELSEWHERE: Java is becoming less secure, writes Dan Goodin at Ars Technica, thanks to a rising number of exploits and vulnerabilities in older versions that will never be patched.